broadcasting the rainbow nation: media, …broadcasting the rainbow nation: media, democracy, and...

BROADCASTING THE RAINBOWNATION: MEDIA, DEMOCRACY, ANDNATION-BUILDING IN SOUTH AFRICA

SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOWCLIVE BARNETT

Clive Barnett*

Media, Culture, and Policy

In April 1994, nationwide nonracial elections heralded the formal end ofapartheid in South Africa, leading to the establishment of a Governmentof National Unity led by the African National Congress (ANC) but alsoincluding representatives from the National Party (NP) and the InkathaFreedom Party (IFP). The South African Broadcasting Corporation(SABC), previously a bastion of the apartheid state and a mouthpiece forthe ruling NP, provided extensive coverage of the election campaign thatwas unprecedented in both its scale and the degree of balance, fairness,and neutrality it displayed (Teer-Tomaselli, 1995). The elections markedonly the beginning of the full-scale restructuring of the broadcastingsector in South Africa. This paper discusses the processes of broadcastingreform between 1990 and 1998. In this period the broadcasting environ-ment has been transformed, with changes in programming, diversifica-tion of ownership, and expansion of services. Nonetheless, the progress ofreform also indicates the extent to which inherited economic, institutional,and cultural conditions continue to impose limitations on the practicalimplementation of a progressive conceptualisation of the mass media as avehicle for nation-building and democratic communication.

Radio and television have been ascribed multiple and often contradic-tory roles in the process of democratic transition and consolidation in SouthAfrica. First, conceptualised as a medium of political communication, the

Antipode 31:3, 1999, pp. 274–303ISSN 0066-4812

*Department of Geography, The University of Reading, Reading, England; e-mail: [email protected]

© 1999 Editorial Board of AntipodePublished by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.

mass media are given a pivotal role in the democratic information policyenshrined in the ANC’s blueprint for post-apartheid transformation, theReconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). The RDP presents avision of participatory democracy and decision-making that presupposeswidespread access to the basic means of communication (African NationalCongress, 1994:133–135). Second, broadcasting has been identified as a cen-tral element of industrial policies directed at boosting economic growth anddevelopment by fostering foreign investment and international competi-tiveness. Third, the electronic media have been presented as a medium ofnational reconciliation and unification. Radio and television are seen as theimportant stages for symbolic representations of the “rainbow” concept of“One Nation, Many Cultures.”

Nation-building in the South African context of the 1990s is not offi-cially understood merely as a project of constructing a single, overarchingnational culture or identity. Policy makers have conceptualised it primar-ily in terms of facilitating processes of exchange and dialogue betweenSouth Africa’s different cultural, regional, and linguistic communities.And official nation-building rhetoric ascribes a central role to radio andtelevision as the media of communication through which such exchangecan be facilitated. Nor does nation-building depend simply upon theformal recognition of “cultural diversity.” First, any such recognition ispremised upon political equality and undifferentiated rights of equal citi-zenship. Second, patterns of cultural difference in South Africa remaintightly linked to inherited patterns of economic inequality, and thereforeare intimately related to differences in social power. Third, official cul-tural policies are characterised by a tension between the commitment torecognise and promote cultural diversity on the one hand and a strongcommitment by the ANC to depoliticise ethnicity on the other. Thetension turns upon the fact that realising the former goal involves thepolitically contested redistribution of resources between communities,interests, and institutions. Hence, efforts to redress past inequalities inresource allocation tend to exacerbate tendencies towards thepoliticisation of cultural identities.

Given South Africa’s history of state control and censorship of film,radio and television, literature, and print media, there has been a strongimpulse to shift the administration of cultural practices from direct stateprovision to forms of market provision, with the state’s role redefined asensuring effective regulation of markets. This shift in cultural policyopens a space for the extended commodification of cultural practices andmedia services. This is, in turn, associated with a shift in the scales atwhich cultural practices are effectively governed, from national level tothe scale of internationalized markets, and also towards subnationalscales of regional and local provision of media services. It is in this contextof restructuring that “culture” as an object of policy in South Africa hasbeen reconfigured conceptually and institutionally during the 1990s.

SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW 275

Understandings of culture which privilege ethnicity have been displacedby understandings of culture as “arts” and “popular culture” and of iden-tities as multiple rather than singular. Institutionally, state-controlled cul-tural institutions have been restructured and a new array of independentpublic agencies has been established.

Through a process of politically contested policy formulation andimplementation, broadcasting has been reconfigured around the norma-tive model of the mass media as a single public sphere at a national scaleproviding a space for democratic communication and national unifica-tion. The ascendancy of this model in South Africa in the 1990s needs to beunderstood in the context of a society in which the media have previouslybeen used as an ideological and material technology of separation anddivision. South African media policy in the 1990s is hardly peculiar in theemphasis it places upon trying to ensure collective stability, politicalorder, and national identity through the use of public communicationsystems (see Samarajiva and Shields, 1990). National unity as the norma-tive ideal of broadcasting and telecommunications policy has, however,come under increasing strain due to a combination of technologicalchange, shifts in regulatory policies, corporate restructuring, and the glob-alization and deterritorialization of cultural identities (Collins, 1990;Morley and Robins, 1995). In particular, the increasingly commercializednature of broadcasting systems such as those in South Africa, and theincreasing importance of economic policy imperatives relative to those ofcultural policy in shaping broadcasting reform, weaken the state’s abilityto deploy broadcasting systems as a means of governing cultural practicesfor purposes of large-scale social integration (see Schlesinger and Doyle,1994; Shields and Muppidi, 1996).

This paper argues that the limits of conceptualizations of the massmedia as a vehicle of national unification are not derived from the inher-ent difficulties of forging unity in a so-called “deeply divided society.”They are imposed because cultural and linguistic differences areintimately correlated with entrenched patterns of extreme socioeconomicinequality. The limits on using the mass media as instruments ofnation-building are derived from the interaction of this pattern of socialrelations with the institutional configuration of a single national publicservice broadcaster which remains overwhelmingly dependent oncommercial revenue sources. The SABC’s financial dependence on com-mercial advertising has particular significance in shaping its transforma-tion from a state broadcaster into an independent public servicebroadcaster that is supposed to serve as the medium for a diversity ofopinions and positions. The organisation of commercial communicationssystems along market-oriented lines prioritises the delivery of audiencesconstituted as prospective consumers to advertisers. This contrasts withthe conventional role ascribed to public service broadcasters, that of deliv-ering diverse quality programming to audiences considered as citizens.

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This difference in emphasis is accentuated by the internationalization ofcommunication industries, which is effectively redefining the role of theseindustries in strategies of national development. Traditional policy sce-narios using the broadcast media as instruments of national integrationand economic development programmes are increasingly at odds withthe economic, political, and cultural forces shaped by media and telecom-munications. Increasingly, cultural policies are being deployed as a meansof negotiating entry into international markets networks of productionand consumption (Bennett et al., 1994).

The formal transition from apartheid to liberal, representative formsof governance requires a different critical vocabulary through which toaddress the transformation of broadcasting institutions. A wholly op-positional perspective is no longer adequate. Instead, attention is shiftedtowards evaluation of issues of access, accountability, participation, andpolitical representation (see Chrisman, 1996). Accordingly, the concern inthis paper is not primarily with examining representations of diversity inprogramming. It is rather with the institutional frameworks and socialrelations that have shaped the terrain for effective decision-making andlimited the scope for action in policy-making. The politics of represen-tation in this broader institutional sense directs attention towards ques-tions of how processes of institutional transformation help determine theagendas shaping what gets produced and transmitted through radio andtelevision.

The paper proceeds from a discussion of the legacy of apartheid broad-casting policy to a consideration of the changing role of regulatory agen-cies in transforming South African broadcasting. It then relates this to thetransformation of the public broadcaster and to broader shifts in the eco-nomic policies of the Government of National Unity led by the ANC. Thepaper concludes with some consideration of how the progress of broad-casting reform points towards broader issues raised by processes of “dem-ocratic transition” in South Africa.

The Legacies of Apartheid Broadcasting

Historically, South African broadcasting has been dominated by theSABC, which was incorporated into the network of cultural, economic,and political institutions through which the Afrikaner nationalism of theNP secured its hegemony from the 1950s onwards (Orlik, 1978). Afri-kaans and English were privileged as the national broadcast languages.Apartheid language policy also codified and institutionalised nine Afri-can languages, each of which was thought of as corresponding to adistinct ethnic identity. The 1960s saw the full-scale introduction of radioservices in African languages. Separate-language radio stations broad-cast for separate audiences, in discrete territorial units. With the


introduction of television services from the mid-1970s, programming dif-ferentiated sharply between channels on the basis of race, with one chan-nel explicitly directed at white Afrikaans- and English-speakingaudiences and another aimed at nonwhite audiences (Tomaselli et al.,1989).1 The SABC has operated in part as a commercial broadcaster sincethe 1950s. Given its relation to the institutional frameworks of Afrikanernationalism and the apartheid state on the one hand and its financialdependence on advertising revenues on the other, the SABC has stood ina highly compromised relationship with respect to the imperatives ofboth the state and the market. Consequently, it has fallen far short of theprinciples of public service broadcasting as they have been understoodinternationally over the last half century (Teer-Tomaselli, 1996; Teer-Tomaselli and Tomaselli, 1996).

The current technological infrastructure of broadcasting reflectsapartheid-era policies of differential investment in infrastructure and ser-vices for different groups. In broadcasting, as in other sectors, dispropor-tionate amounts of money were invested during that era in the radio andtelevision services aimed at white audiences. Media audiences in SouthAfrica are highly fragmented in terms both of unequal access to materialresources and of different tastes, interests, and capacities which distin-guish social groups. While less than 5% of all South Africans read a dailynewspaper, 89.5% of households own a radio, and 61.7% a television(South African Advertising Research Foundation, 1997). Radio, ratherthan television, is the universal mass medium in South Africa. Socialgroups demonstrate a marked disparity in ownership of televisions.2 (SeeTables 1, 2, and 3.) These differences reflect in large part the highlyunequal distribution of income in South Africa.

Access to radio and television signals is also extremely uneven geo-graphically. None of the SABC’s three television stations has a broadcastsignal with complete national coverage; nor do any of its radio stations.

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Table 1 Percentage of Households Owning TV Sets

Total[Households:

8,478,000]

Blacks[Households:

5,961,000]

Coloureds,Indians, and

Whites[Households:

2,517,000]

Whites[Households:

1,668,000]

1993 56.1 39.7 91.2 96.31994 57.6 41.9 91.5 95.71995 58.6 43.8 92.9 96.21996 61.6 48.3 93.2 96.51997 61.7 49.2 91.3 94.5

Source: South African Advertising Research Foundation, All Media Products Survey 1997.

Rural areas are particularly poorly served, and to a considerable extenttelevision is an urban media form.

Broadcasting in South Africa has not, then, historically provided acommon space of public communication. Rather, it has been used toreproduce notions of separate and distinct populations, cultures, and geo-graphical spaces. In seeking to overcome these legacies of apartheidbroadcasting, policy since 1994 has focused upon transforming the SABCinto a politically independent and financially viable public service broad-caster, and on developing a more diverse system of regulated competitionin both radio and television.

In the South African context, the aim of constituting the media as a pub-lic sphere supportive of a diverse, independent civil society and as aninstrument of nation-building is faced with the hurdle of extending accessto the means of communication in both technological and cultural terms.Infrastructural programs, including electrification and telephone rollout,


Table 2 Percentage of Households Owning Radios

Total[Households:

8,478,000]

Blacks[Households:

5,961,000]


Whites[Households:

2,517,000]

Whites[Households:

1,668,000]

1993 87.5 84.2 94.6 98.11994 87.9 84.8 94.8 98.01995 87.0 83.8 94.6 97.91996 89.1 86.7 94.8 98.41997 89.5 87.2 95.0 98.1


Table 3 Percentage of Households with M-Net Subscription

Total[Households:

8,478,000]

Blacks[Households:

5,961,000]


Whites[Households:

2,517,000]

Whites[Households:

1,668,000]

1993 10.0 1.0 29.5 34.81994 10.9 1.1 32.5 39.21995 10.9 1.0 33.8 41.61996 11.5 1.5 35.3 43.61997 11.3 1.4 34.8 44.0


have as their object increasing access to basic technologies of communica-tions. The question of access in cultural terms, in the case of radio and tele-vision, has centered on issues of language provision. The ambitious butrather vague constitutional principles of language equity have directedpolicies for extending access to mass mediated information to all SouthAfricans, regardless of the language they speak and the place they live in.

The commercialized nature of broadcasting in South Africa, however,imposes two definite limits upon the extension of access through equita-ble coverage on a national scale of eleven official languages. First, theextension of competition has led to the increased fragmentation of mediaaudiences as expansion of choice has outstripped growth in overall size ofaudiences. Second, the classical role of the public service broadcaster insuch a scenario is to serve the interests of those groups and audiences whoare marginalised or ignored by commercial broadcasters for economicreasons. The SABC has certainly set out to do this in a highly innovativeway. In so doing, however, it has found itself caught on the horns of adilemma. If it is to maintain its financial viability, it must compete withnew broadcasters for relatively limited and slow-growing advertisingrevenue, duplicating programming in trying to attract affluent audiences.On the other hand, targeting wider and more diverse audiences is notcost-effective, because such audiences do not attract the same level ofadvertising revenue. In what follows, I shall trace the ways in which thiscontradiction has played itself out since 1993 and indicate how it has beenassociated with significant shifts of emphasis in state policies towards thebroadcasting sector.

Moving Towards “Independent” Broadcasting

During the 1980s, the shift by the NP towards neoliberal free marketeconomic policies led to the commercialisation or privatisation of various“parastatals,” those public corporations which had effective monopolycontrol over such sectors as telecommunications, energy, and transporta-tion (see Horwitz, 1994). Following this trend, the SABC was reorganisedinto commercial business units in 1991. These moves were seen by the leftas a preemptive attempt to break up the national public broadcaster andshift regulation from the state to the market (Currie and Markovitz, 1993).Given the entrenched patterns of economic ownership and control inSouth Africa, broadcasting would continue to be effectively shaped inthe interests of white minorities. Opposition to this unilateral restructur-ing process crystallised around the review of broadcasting policy set inmotion by the government’s establishment of a “Task Group on Broad-casting in South and Southern Africa.” A series of “civil society” groupsmore or less closely associated with the mass democratic movementchallenged the legitimacy of the Task Group. Despite the dispute

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engendered by this challenge, however, there turned out to be a consider-able degree of convergence between the policy positions of the civil soci-ety groups on the left and the recommendations of the task group. Thisoccurred particularly on the issue of the need to establish an independentregulatory authority to oversee broadcasting reform (Jabulani!, 1991;Republic of South Africa, 1991).

The loose affiliation of independent civil society organisations on theleft wielded considerable influence in shaping the agenda of mediadebates in the early 1990s. These debates focused on resisting the NP’smoves to restructure broadcasting prior to a broader political settlement,and on campaigns for the appointment of a new and independent SABCBoard to ensure neutral broadcasting in the run-up to elections (see Louw,1993). Internal debates within the ANC culminated in the publication of aMedia Charter in January 1992 (Teer-Tomaselli, 1993). Reflecting the ascen-dancy within the ANC of the pluralist position first developed by the civilsociety organisations over a more centralist, statist position, the Charterrecognised the right to receive and disseminate information as a basicrequirement of democratic citizenship and participation, and establisheda commitment to an independent public service broadcaster regulated byan independent body (African National Congress, 1992).

During 1992 and 1993, a process of what might be called negativeconvergence took place between different political parties on the questionof broadcasting reform. The NP did not want the ANC to have unfetteredcontrol of the airwaves after the forthcoming elections, and the ANC didnot want the NP to maintain control over broadcasting during the elec-tions. In the context of this impasse, the principle of independent broad-casting regulation was established. As a consequence, agreement to theprinciple of an independent regulatory authority for broadcasting andtelecommunications was one of the few concrete issues settled during thepolitical negotiations at the Conference for a Democratic South Africa(CODESA) during 1992 (Friedman, 1993:52–54). When multiparty negoti-ations resumed in 1993 with elections imminent, telecommunications wasimmediately separated from broadcasting and put to one side by theworking party charged with drafting the relevant legislation. This deci-sion was made in the light of “the need to create independent broadcastregulatory mechanisms as a matter of urgency,” although this did not pre-clude the merging of broadcasting and telecommunications regulatorystructures in the future (First Report, 1993:pp. n/a). As a result, in October1993 the Transitional Executive Authority passed an Independent Broad-casting Authority (IBA) Act (Republic of South Africa, 1993a).

The IBA Act was the product of a fragile and contingent consensus thatit was imperative to ensure that broadcasting be made independent ofdirect government interference. The IBA’s mandate might be best charac-terized as an example of “regulated pluralism”: it was meant to establishan institutional framework to secure a plurality of independent


broadcasters, necessitating both the deconcentration of media industriesand the separation of media from the state (Thompson, 1995:240–241;Tomaselli, 1994). The IBA Act recognized that the unfettered operations ofthe market cannot guarantee, and may indeed run counter to, the mainte-nance of diversity and pluralism in the media sector. It therefore con-tained a strong emphasis on regulating the market for broadcastingservices in the interest of viable competition and diversity by limitingcross-media ownership and encouraging ownership of broadcasting ser-vices by “historically disadvantaged groups.” The IBA was, however, aproduct of a political compromise concerning state interference in theoperations of capital in the postapartheid broadcasting sector. Important,the IBA Act entrenched the rights of existing broadcasters, including thoseof M-Net. And the IBA is legislatively bound to “protect the integrity andviability of public service broadcasting services” (Republic of South Africa1993a:2[d]). This ambiguous clause means that the IBA has been forced tooperate as a “captured” agency from its inception, insofar as it is obligedto protect the position of the SABC.

The progress of broadcasting reform since the elections of 1994 underthe Government of National Unity needs to be placed in the wider contextof the evolving political and economic agenda of the ANC (see Lazar,1996; Nattrass, 1994). With the end of apartheid, there has been an uneasyrealignment between capital, the new political regime, and organizedlabor (Adam et al., 1997). There has also been a movement away fromthe original RDP blueprint, which premised economic growth and devel-opment on reconstruction and redistribution. In June 1996, a neweconomic policy framework document, Growth, Employment and Redistri-bution (GEAR), was released, marking a significant shift in emphasis rela-tive to the original blueprint. Prioritizing fiscal prudence, GEAR implies aclear commitment to reducing state involvement in the economy in orderto reduce public expenditure (Adelzadeh, 1996). This shift in broad eco-nomic policy provides in turn the context for two much-discussedprocesses of economic transformation: so-called black economic “empow-erment,” and the “restructuring of state assets,” or privatization. Both ofthese processes have been most rapidly advanced in the print and elec-tronic media sectors.

Black economic empowerment refers to the rapid emergence and con-solidation since 1994 of a handful of black-owned corporations. This phe-nomenon is largely the result of the politically inspired unbundling ofcorporate assets by white-owned companies. It has facilitated the emer-gence of major black-owned corporations such as New Africa InvestmentsLimited (NAIL), Capital Alliance, Kagiso Investment Trust, and ThebeInvestments. Black economic empowerment through unbundling charac-teristically features the involvement of trade union investment groups,which have been able to leverage the savings and pension funds of theirmemberships in order to secure strategic equity stakes in companies and

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representation on their boards. One significant result of these processeshas been the restructuring of ownership of the South African press. Previ-ously dominated by two Afrikaans-language groups, Nasionale Pers andPerskor, and—through the Argus Group and Times Media Limited—bythe colossal Anglo-American Corporation, this sector has been altered bythe entry of both international capital and domestic black empowermentconsortiums.

Privatization, a highly contentious political issue, cuts to the heart ofthe political alliance between the ANC, the Congress of South AfricanTrade Unions (COSATU), and the South African Communist Party(SACP). The emergent model adopted by the ANC-led government from1995–1996 involves the formation of partnerships with private corpora-tions in which the state retains a controlling stake. By reserving a propor-tion of the shares in any state-owned company for black businesses andemployees, this strategy is presented as a means of increasing the oppor-tunities for black South Africans to participate in the economy. Questionshave been raised, however, over the extent to which ownership of equitystakes translates into effective control, and over the political implicationsof the rapid enrichment of a small black elite.

These ongoing processes provide the broader economic and policycontext in which the reregulation of broadcasting has been undertaken.3

The rapid advance of both corporate unbundling and privatization in themedia industries pinpoints a central ambivalence over the practical mean-ing of “independence” of broadcasting organizations and regulators inthe changing South African broadcasting environment. “Independence”has referred primarily to freedom from direct state interference, but inpractice this has involved a much greater role than before for private capi-tal and market mechanisms. Given highly uneven patterns of ownershipand access to capital, the challenge which has faced the IBA in its imple-mentation of broadcasting reform has been that of how to square the aimof independence from the state with independence from the influence thatfollows from unbridled market power (Melody, 1997).

Reimagining South African Broadcasting

The IBA Act specified that the transformation of broadcasting could not pro-ceed before the completion of inquiries into three issues: the means of pro-tecting the viability of the public broadcaster; limitations on cross-mediaownership; and local content quotas on South African radio and televisionbroadcasters.4 The resulting “Triple Inquiry,” beginning in April 1994, wasundertaken in the new spirit of openness, consultation, and participationthat has characterized policy formulation in a wide variety of sectors.5

The main issues to be resolved by the Triple Inquiry included howmuch of the broadcasting market the SABC should be allowed to control


in the future and— following from this—how a restructured SABC shouldbe financed. Most organisations agreed that the SABC should be signifi-cantly streamlined in order to open up space for new entrants. Civil soci-ety organisations argued that the SABC should reduce its dependence onadvertising revenue because this compromised its new public servicemandate. Prospective private commercial broadcasters argued that theSABC accounted for too much of the available share of advertising expen-diture and therefore threatened the viability of new broadcasters. Despitethis apparent convergence, these different groups did not constitute asingle, coherent political lobby. The Triple Inquiry revealed significantdifferences between the various interests over how exactly to conceptual-ise public service broadcasting (Independent Broadcasting Authority,1995b:150). Private commercial broadcasters and advertisers sharply dif-ferentiated public service broadcasting from commercial broadcasting,arguing that public service broadcasting should be the sole responsibilityof a noncommercial broadcaster delivering educational, religious, andcultural programming. Commercial broadcasters would thus be freedfrom public service obligations to concentrate on the task of deliveringaudiences to advertisers and profits to shareholders. In contrast, civil soci-ety organisations on the left conceptualised public service broadcasting asa set of obligations and responsibilities that extended to all broadcasters,including private commercial broadcasters.

During the Inquiry process, an equally important division emergedbetween the SABC’s centralist conceptualisation of public service broad-casting as the responsibility of a single national public broadcaster andthe more pluralistic, diversified, and regionally decentralised conceptu-alisation of public service broadcasting presented by the main civil societyorganisations (see Horwitz, 1996). The most important of these latterorganisations lobbying the IBA during 1994 and 1995, the so-called“Group of Thirteen,”6 argued for a strong but decentralised public servicebroadcaster. They also maintained that the SABC should be limited to justtwo television channels, making it less dependent on advertising expendi-ture. They proposed that the vacated third channel be relicensed as apublicly regulated commercial network of regional stations (Group ofThirteen, 1994).

During the Triple Inquiry, a number of arguments were aired in favourof developing regional and provincial broadcasting services. Civil societygroups favoured decentralisation as a means of democratisation. Com-mercial interests from the Western Cape argued that it was a means oftapping unrealised advertising markets. And the Bophuthatswana Broad-casting Corporation, based in the former homeland state, argued stronglyfor a plurality of regional and national public service broadcasting sys-tems as part of its efforts to stave off incorporation into the SABC.7 Thus avariety of groups believed that the nation-building role of broadcasting,representing and promoting the linguistic and cultural diversity of South

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Africa, would be best served by a range of public and commercial broad-casters operating on national and regional scales, rather than by a singlecentralised national public service broadcaster (Independent Broadcast-ing Authority, 1995a). Again, however, these different interests did notcoalesce into a coherent political lobby in favour of regionally decentral-ised broadcasting, since they represented markedly divergent social inter-ests and political visions.

Throughout 1994 and 1995, the SABC underwent extensive restructur-ing. A new statement of “Vision and Values,” produced after the appoint-ment of a new representative Board of Governors in 1993, committed theSABC to providing fair, equitable, and accessible programming to allSouth Africans and to rectifying past imbalances (South African Broad-casting Corporation, 1993:1). The main aim shaping the SABC’s submis-sions to the Triple Inquiry was the defence of its own financial viabilityfrom the competition that would result from the opening of the airwavesto new commercial broadcasters. The most disputed issue proved to bethe future of the SABC’s television services. The new management team,appointed after the elections of 1994, abandoned the previous position ofpreparing to privatize certain services, committing the SABC instead tothe retention of the bulk of its existing services in order to deliver anextensive public service programming mandate. The Corporation nowproposed retaining all three existing channels, integrating public andcommercial functions in different degrees on each. These proposals, alongwith those for retaining a full complement of radio stations, reflected thecentrality accorded to the question of language in the SABC’s submissionsto the Triple Inquiry in late 1994 and during 1995.

The Triple Inquiry became a forum in which the practical implicationsof the new constitutional provisions on language were worked out. TheInterim Constitution, a product of political compromise during negotia-tions of 1993, included language provisions based upon the functionalmultilingualism of most South Africans (Republic of South Africa, 1993b).This constitutional recognition of eleven official languages was politicallyambivalent.8 It enshrined the status of nine standardised African lan-guages, the precise statuses of which are open to much dispute (Alexan-der, 1989; Louw, 1992). It also included, however, a clear commitment toupgrading these nine languages from regional to national status. Thiseffectively broke the conceptual triad of language-ethnicity-region uponwhich apartheid language policies had been based.9

The SABC was the first institution to undertake the task of translatingthese principles into practical measures (Heugh, 1994; South AfricanBroadcasting Corporation, 1994b). In so doing, it has had to balance twoapparently contradictory injunctions written into the constitution. On theone hand, there is the commitment to extend and promote the use ofpreviously marginalised African languages. On the other hand, this mustbe done without contravening the principle of nondiminution of existing


language rights on which the compromise of eleven languages rests(Sachs, 1994). Given the political and economic factors that have strength-ened the position of English in broadcasting since 1994, this balancing acthas tended to be resolved by increasing the coverage of African languageson television by reducing the proportion of Afrikaans-language program-ming. This process has prompted protest and legal challenges from Afri-kaans culture and language organisations.10

In its most important statement to the IBA’s Triple Inquiry, made inresponse to the looming threat of losing one of its three television chan-nels, the SABC presented a vision of the national public service broad-caster as central to nation-building (South African BroadcastingCorporation, 1994c). This was translated in turn into an argument con-cerning the SABC’s responsibility to provide equitable broadcastingcoverage in all eleven of South Africa’s newly official languages. In itssubmissions to the IBA, the SABC argued that the task of providingbroadcasting coverage in all eleven official languages was its sole respon-sibility. This contrasted with the position laid down in the IBA Act, whichstipulated that “diversity” would be provided across the whole spectrumof the broadcasting system. The language issue therefore provided thebasis for the argument that the corporation should retain a much greatershare of the available broadcasting spectrum than suggested by the othermain interests lobbying the IBA (South African Broadcasting Corpora-tion, 1995a). This stood in contrast to the arguments of the main civil soci-ety organisations. From their perspective, the SABC was invoking anoverly rigid interpretation of its language mandate as part of an expan-sionary counter-thrust to the argument that it needed to be slimmeddown and decentralised. They maintained that the SABC should broad-cast only in the four or five main national languages, and that provincialpublic broadcasters should be set up to broadcast in the main languagesof respective regions.

The IBA’s Triple Inquiry Report, finally published in August 1995, com-promised in its main recommendations between the position of the SABCand the pluralist position most forcefully articulated by the Group ofThirteen. While largely accepting the SABC’s model of its language man-date, the Report proposed that this could be met with only two televisionstations. The Report’s most important proposals suggested that the publicbroadcaster be obliged to sell eight of its commercial regional radio sta-tions and that it be limited to only two television channels after 1998.11 TheSABC’s third television channel would be relicensed as a new commercialstation with significant public service obligations, and the IBA would alsolicense further private metropolitan radio stations (Independent Broad-casting Authority, 1995b:9–12). These proposals were based on theassumption that the SABC would be less dependent on advertising in thefuture, and that decreased advertising revenue would be replaced bysome form of government funding.

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The SABC immediately restated its view that it would not be able todeliver on its public service mandate with only two television stations(South African Broadcasting Corporation, 1995b). Authority for approv-ing the IBA’s proposals lay with Parliament, and late 1995 saw extensivelobbying to have the Triple Inquiry Report revised. In response particularlyto the SABC’s lobbying, the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee onCommunications amended the Report in February 1996. The SABC wasallowed to retain two of the original eight radio stations earmarked forsale, and all three of its television channels. The amendment also stipu-lated that a new television service should be licensed by the middle of1997 and affirmed the proposal that government funding of the SABC ona triennial basis should cover the costs of increased local content andlanguage programming and of regional splits (Government Gazette, 1996).Like the IBA in the Triple Inquiry Report, the Portfolio Committee did notquestion the SABC’s own interpretation of its responsibilities regardinglanguage, which had been deployed to argue for the retention of threetelevision stations. The amendment of the Triple Inquiry Report repre-sented a significant rebuff for the IBA, and revealed its relative lack ofpolitical influence compared to the SABC, which has become clearer astime has passed. This raises serious questions about the extent to whichthe politically powerful SABC can be made accountable to an independentregulator.

Redefining “Independent” Broadcasting Regulation

In South Africa, understandings of democracy have been tied closely tothe rhetoric of nation-building. The role of the mass media since 1994 inthe democratization process has been seen primarily in symbolic terms, asdisseminating appropriate representations of national togetherness whichadequately reflect South Africa’s cultural diversity. This notion of nation-building dovetails with an instrumentalist conception of the relationshipbetween the mass media, diversification, and democratization. The ANChas equated democratization with the entry of black empowermentcapital into the print and broadcasting media (Tomaselli, 1997). Given thehistory of the SABC’s monopoly on broadcasting, and given a historicallyoligopolistic print media, it has easily been assumed that the democratiza-tion of the mass media in South Africa in the 1990s can be guaranteed byincreasing “competition” and “expanding choice.”

In this context, the question arises of whether, in a society with a highlyuneven distribution of income, an overwhelmingly commercializedbroadcasting system can deliver on a public service mission of providingaccess and information to a diversity of audiences. Breaking the SABC’smonopoly over broadcasting has meant the opening up of new opportuni-ties for commodification and for the accumulation of capital. The view


that equates media democratization with the diversification of ownershipand increased competition is tempered by the acknowledgment that adiversity of outlets and opinions might be reduced by inherent tendencieswithin the media industries towards concentration and centralization.This is why the establishment of the IBA gained widespread support inthe early 1990s, to ensure the independent regulation of an expanding andincreasingly competitive media and communications sector.Acknowledgment of the limits of this economistic model of democratiza-tion extend only to placing limits on the negative effects of excessive mar-ket power.

Since 1994, the IBA’s performance has been caught up in wider politicalprocesses: the SABC’s uneasy relations with government and its ongoingbattle with the private subscription channel, M-Net; legal challengesby Afrikaner cultural organizations unhappy with the treatment of theAfrikaans languages in the revamped broadcasting environment; realign-ments of capital, eager to secure positions in the rapidly expanding andprofitable media and communications industries; and the evolution of theANC’s political and economic agendas for transformation. Capital,national government, and the SABC have increasingly seen the IBA as anencumbrance to their very different interests, with its lengthy proceduresfor applications, consultations, hearings, recommendations, and appeals,and with a mandate to serve the long-term viability of the broadcastingenvironment.

The rapid development of systematic opposition to the IBA might bebest understood as flowing from the divergence between the IBA’sadministrative rationality on the one hand and the political and economicrationalities of capital and government on the other. In line with experi-ence elsewhere, as these forms of rationality diverge, one would expect towitness a growing move to transform the current regulatory arrange-ments (Horwitz, 1989:19). This is exactly what transpired in the course of1996 and 1997, as a widespread view emerged that the current regulatoryregime needed to be overhauled. This culminated in the establishment ofa new year-long broadcasting policy review process, this time much moreclosely directed by the Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications, and Broad-casting. After the publication of policy proposals in autumn 1997 andspring 1998, comprehensive broadcasting legislation was presented toParliament in August 1998. In line with stated aims of relocating broad-casting policy within the context of economic policies aimed at boostingthe international competitiveness of domestic industries, this legislationconfirmed the more limited role for regulatory agencies and the furtherexpansion and commercialization of radio and television services.

The policy review of 1997–98 essentially drew a line under the processof broadcasting reform begun in the early 1990s. The original ambiguityabout the duration of an independent regulatory body for broadcasting—which was intended to be more than merely transitional for the period

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of elections but also to be revamped into a combined broadcasting andtelecommunications regulator—was used to justify reducing the degree ofindependence of any such combined body. In certain respects, the out-comes of the policy review were effectively decided in advance, in con-trast to the pattern of policy formulation during 1994 and 1995. Thiswas most evidently the case in the decision to merge the IBA with therecently established South African Telecommunications RegulatoryAuthority (SATRA).

The new agenda for broadcasting confirmed in 1998 places the sectorsquarely within a broader communications policy that aims to boost man-ufacturing capacity as part of a broader internationalization strategy. Thisimplies that government should take a more interventionist positionregarding the setting of media policy than was the case during 1994 and1995. The justification for the regulation of broadcasting and telecommu-nications has thus been significantly altered. In place of a political andcultural justification based on a definition of national interest whichprioritizes democracy and diversity, the national interest in the communi-cations sector has been redefined in terms of economic growth.

This shift in emphasis in broadcasting policy needs to be seen in thecontext of telecommunications restructuring. Telecommunications dwarfsbroadcasting as an economic sector, and is critical to the infrastructuraldevelopment program that is pivotal to the ANC’s political program. Anew Telecommunications Act was passed in November 1996 (Republic ofSouth Africa, 1996a). In March 1997 Jay Naidoo, a former Secretary-General of COSATU and the recently appointed Minister of Posts, Tele-communications, and Broadcasting, secured the agreement of the tradeunions to the partial privatization of Telkom, the monopoly telecommuni-cations operator in South Africa. This opened the way for the completionof the sale of a 30% equity stake in Telkom to a consortium of TelekomMalaysia and the U.S. telecommunications corporation, SBC Communica-tions. The deal, heralded as the biggest capital investment in the newSouth Africa, promised to jumpstart an R53 billion infrastructural devel-opment program. The political legitimacy of the deal was secured when,in early April 1997, it was announced that a further 10% of Telkom shareswould be sold to black business and labor.

In contrast to the broadcasting sector, telecommunications privatiza-tion has not yet been accompanied by significant market liberalization.Telkom’s monopoly position remains protected for an unspecified period.One effect of this difference in market conditions in broadcasting and tele-communications is that SATRA lacks the degree of independence enjoyedby the IBA. SATRA answers directly to the Ministry of Posts, Telecommu-nications and Broadcasting, rather than to Parliament as the IBA does.Additionally, rather than operating to open up the telecommunicationssector, SATRA has largely functioned to protect Telkom from increasedcompetition. This difference in the extent of the two bodies’ independence


from government has led some to question whether the proposed mergerof the IBA into SATRA represents an effort by the ANC to exert moredirect control over broadcasting. The persistent criticism that has beendirected at the print media by leaders like Nelson Mandela and DeputyPresident Thabo Mbeki has animated this concern. The ANC has grownincreasingly concerned about its ability to manage the flow of communi-cations (Louw, 1995). While the convergence of regulatory agencies mightbe considered consistent with broader international trends in informationand communications sectors, this has been a politically controversialprocess in South Africa due to the degree of political significance ascribedto the principle of independence of broadcasting organizations andregulators.

Broadcasting Transformed

The fate of the IBA in the transition period from 1994 to 1999 has beenbound up with the twists and turns of the SABC’s dramatic transforma-tion from mouthpiece for apartheid policies to independent public broad-caster. Even before the Triple Inquiry was completed, the SABC wasproceeding with plans to relaunch its television portfolio, always assum-ing that it would retain all three of its stations. The SABC continued withits plans unchanged after the publication of the Triple Inquiry Report andbefore the Portfolio Committee had amended the Report. CCV-TV, previ-ously directed at a mainly black audience, was to be relaunched as SABC1. TV1, with a predominantly white audience, was to be relaunched asSABC 2. The third, “spare,” channel would be upgraded into SABC 3.With a broadcast footprint covering about half of the country, SABC 1would focus on programming in the main Nguni languages, Zulu andXhosa, as well as in English. With the largest footprint, covering aboutthree-quarters of the country, SABC 2 would cover the main Sotho lan-guages of Sepedi, Sesotho, and Setswana, plus Afrikaans. SABC 3 wouldbe a commercially oriented English language channel. Largely restrictedto metropolitan areas, it was meant to cross-subsidize the public serviceprogramming, which would be mainly concentrated in the other twochannels.

The SABC’s high-profile television relaunch went ahead at the begin-ning of February 1996. The changes were heralded as the end of apartheidtelevision. New channel identities explicitly reflected the ethos of “rain-bow” broadcasting. Rather than addressing white and black audienceson separate channels, as in the past, the new television services mixedlanguage groups in different proportions on different channels. Thechanges marked the ascendancy of English as the dominant broadcastinglanguage. (See Table 4.) In addition to the relative cost advantages ofpurchasing imported English-language programming, the SABC’s justifi-cation during the Triple Inquiry for this focus on English had been based

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on SABC-conducted research, which established that viewers much pre-ferred English for programming in a second language (see Thirion andVan Vuuren, 1995).

The television relaunch precipitated a further decline in the size of theSABC’s “CIW” (Coloureds, Indians and Whites) audience. While overallaudience figures remained largely unchanged following the relaunch, therelative balance of television audiences shifted significantly, with the pro-portion of CIW viewers falling and offset by an increase in the proportionof black viewers. This shift highlights the contradiction underlying theSABC’s transformation. In commercial broadcasting in South Africa, aselsewhere, the aim of programming is to construct audiences with specificdemographic characteristics for advertisers. In South Africa, the demo-graphic characteristics looked for by advertisers are concentrated in avery narrow segment of society, a historical product of racialized patternsof accumulation and income distribution. Economic understandings ofmedia democratization that focus on “competition” and “choice” tend tofinesse this relationship between the financial imperatives of commercialbroadcasting and the highly uneven distribution of power in markets forbroadcasting services. One consequence is that the existence of more sta-tions does not necessarily result in more listeners or viewers. The expan-sion of channels and diversification of ownership has led to greatercompetition for what is still a relatively narrow segment of South Africansociety, the small and affluent minority primarily composed of CIWs thatremains the main target audience for advertisers. While the SABC’s newtelevision programming portfolio reflected national population demo-graphics, it did not reflect the optimum commercial demographics for a


Table 4 Percentage Coverage of Languages during Prime Time onSABC Television, 1996

Language SABC1 SABC2 SABC3 TOTAL

English 29.17 22.77 100 50.65Zulu 17.17 0 0 5.9Xhosa 17.71 0 0 5.9Afrikaans 0 15.70 0 5.23Sepedi 0 12.56 0 4.2Setswana 0 10.21 0 3.4Sesotho 0 8.64 0 2.88Xitsonga 0 0.79 0 0.26Seswati 1.04 0 0 0.34Tshivenda 0 0.79 0 0.26SiNdebele 1.04 0 0 0.34Multilingual 33.33 28.56 0 20.63

Source: South African Broadcasting Corporation, SABC Annual Report 1996.

broadcaster so heavily dependent on advertising expenditure. For the firsttime since its introduction in the 1970s, television’s share of advertisingexpenditure declined relative to other media outlets in 1996, mainly dueto a shift to newspapers, especially to the Afrikaans-language press.

In attempting to extend access through equitable language program-ming while remaining dependent on commercial revenue sources, theSABC seriously jeopardized its financial viability in 1996 and 1997.Increased advertising expenditure did not cover the increased costs ofexpanding African language programs because most South Africanslacked the effective demand to make them an economically attractivemarket for advertisers and their clients. More generally, then, broadcast-ing illustrates the extent to which the interests and tastes of the blackmajority do not register significantly in the commercial calculations ofthe advertising/media nexus, because of inherited patterns of incomeinequality and continued lack of access to funds. As a public servicebroadcaster with a mandate to reflect and promote cultural diversity, andto provide educational, entertainment, and informational programmingin eleven languages on a national scale, the SABC has found itself increas-ingly reliant upon “a funding source that is under no obligation to ensureits continued existence” (Freedom of Expression Institute, 1996:2).

The end of apartheid and the reregulation of broadcasting are bringingabout a proliferation of media outlets at a faster pace than the growth ofadvertising expenditure. The result is escalating audience fragmentationand increasingly careful targeting of audience segments by advertisers,which contradicts the rhetoric in policy circles of constructing a singlenational audience through the medium of broadcast radio and television.This trend is most evident in the radio sector, which has undergone muchmore extensive and rapid transformation than television. The most signif-icant element of radio restructuring was the selling off of six of the SABC’scommercial regional stations during 1996. The SABC, assuming that itwould get the proceeds from the sale, preferred selling the stations to thehighest bidders, which would have reaped more than R600 million (SouthAfrican Broadcasting Corporation, 1996b). The IBA, however, had a dif-ferent set of criteria for the reregulation of radio broadcasting, whichincluded limitations on cross-media ownership, a concern to ensure aviable market for diverse radio broadcasting, and diversity of both owner-ship and programming (Independent Broadcasting Authority, 1996). Bystipulating that the successful bidders would have to have significantrepresentation from “historically disadvantaged groups,” the IBA’s regu-latory framework obliged white-owned capital to forge partnerships withblack empowerment consortia.

In September 1996, all six of the stations were sold to consortia with sig-nificant black empowerment representation. This marked an unprece-dented restructuring of the ownership of radio broadcasting, breaking theSABC’s sixty-year monopoly in this field. Highveld Stereo, in Gauteng

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province, was awarded to the Africa On Air Consortium for the highestsum of R320 million.12 Other black empowerment groups who success-fully bid for radio stations included NAIL and Kagiso Trust Investments.In the cases of three of the six stations, the IBA did not award the licensesto the highest bidders. The sales yielded a combined total of R521 million,compared to the R606 million that would have been raised had theSABC’s favored bidders been successful in each case.

In addition, the proceeds from the sale of the SABC’s radio stationswere transferred to the state, not to the SABC as it had assumed (Republicof South Africa, 1997). The SABC had proceeded with various changesin its operations on the assumption that government funding would beforthcoming to offset increased costs and loss of revenues. Its subsequentdemands for government funding have been backed by both the IBA andthe government-appointed task group on communications, COMTASK(1996), both of which have recommended that the government shouldprovide the general funding required by the Triple Inquiry. The Ministryof Posts, Telecommunications, and Broadcasting, however, has commit-ted funding only for specifically targeted projects. It has thus been able toshape the relations between the SABC and the IBA by determining thefinancial context in which the SABC has been operating, effectively oblig-ing the SABC to circumvent the IBA’s authority and deepen its owndependence on commercial revenue sources.

In late 1996, the SABC relaunched its remaining radio stations, break-ing the model of radio used since the 1930s with new channel identitiesthat did not refer explicitly to language or ethnicity. In March 1997, theIBA awarded seven new metropolitan radio licenses, four in Johannes-burg and three in Cape Town. In its decisions, the IBA again ensured thatthe successful applicants had strong black empowerment credentials, aswell as selecting for programming diversity. The IBA therefore oversawthe successful diversification of radio broadcasting in terms of both own-ership and programming. The radio sell-off and the licensing of newstations have been seen by advocates of independent broadcasting as astrong vindication of the IBA’s originally conceived role, that of directingthe opening up of the airwaves in the interests of diversity and democracy(Currie, 1996).

The IBA’s transformation of radio contrasts with the slow progressmade in television. The licensing of a new privately owned terrestrial tele-vision station stalled during the course of 1997 amidst financial scandalsthat forced the resignation of five of the IBA’s seven councilors and seri-ously damaged its legitimacy as the independent regulator. Meanwhile,the SABC registered a deficit of more than R60 million in the fiscal year1995–96, compared to a surplus of R106 million in 1994–95 (South AfricanBroadcasting Corporation, 1996a). The many and varied causes ofthe SABC’s financial crisis of 1996 and 1997 include the effects of the televi-sion relaunch and of the radio sell-off. In addition, the SABC’s annual


expenditure has increased to cover a variety of additional costs, includingthose of expanded local content and African language programming, ofintroducing regional splits on television, of covering such importantevents as local elections, the proceedings of Parliament and the Truth andReconciliation Commission, and of the integration of the former homelandbroadcasters. The SABC’s investment in satellite television, in the form ofthe analogue AstraSat system, has yet to show any significant return. Andthe level of nonpayment of license fees has progressively worsened (reach-ing levels of almost 60% of households by the end of 1996).

Thus, in the continued absence of general government funding, theSABC has become even more dependent on commercial revenue sourcesin the course of its transformation into a public service broadcaster inde-pendent of the state. (See Table 5.) As this dependence increases, so thepotential impact of any further increase in competition from new entrantsinto the television market becomes that much more serious.

With the onset of financial crisis, the SABC began to revise the positionsit had held publicly during the Triple Inquiry in 1994 and 1995. In late1996 the SABC undertook a thorough Resources Review with the aid of aninternational financial consultancy. In March 1997, the resulting reportrecommended major cutbacks in programming, in-house production, andstaffing levels, arguing that this would cut costs by R450 million and gen-erate R340 million in extra revenue. The report proposed essentially thesame sort of pruning suggested by both independent civil society groupsand private commercial broadcasters in 1994 and 1995. Implementation ofthe proposals served as the prelude to the full-scale corporatization of theSABC in 1998, with the national government as sole shareholder and withprivatization of further selected services likely. The SABC also began torevise its policies on language and regional broadcasting. The SABC’snew position holds that a “revisit of the constitutional guarantee of lan-guages” is “imperative and urgent” (South African Broadcasting Corpo-ration, 1996a:8), reflecting a conviction that a more “practical” approach isrequired which does not adhere rigidly to eleven official languages on anational scale. The possibility of using regional broadcasting services as

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Table 5 Sources of Revenue of the SABC

Total(Million Rand)

Licenses(Million Rand)

Advertising(Million Rand)

Other(Million Rand)

1992–3 1203 276 (23%) 857 (71%) 70 (6%)1993–4 1393 281 (20%) 1026 (745) 86 (6%)1994–5 1613 312 (19%) 1193 (74%) 108 (7%)1995–6 1652 289 (17%) 1293 (78%) 70 (4%)

Source: South African Broadcasting Corporation Annual Report 1994, South African BroadcastingCorporation Annual Report 1996.

the means of solving the issue of language diversity, which the SABCexplicitly opposed during the Triple Inquiry, is again under consideration(South African Broadcasting Corporation, 1997).

The SABC’s deepening financial crisis also led to an increasingly bellig-erent approach to other players within the broadcasting sector. In theSABC’s public statements throughout 1996 and 1997, the IBA was consis-tently blamed for imposing an impractical mandate on the SABC,particularly with respect to language. The SABC repeatedly invoked theIBA Act to argue that the regulatory authority’s primary responsibilitywas to protect the SABC’s financial viability, a task it accused the IBA offailing to honor. During late 1996 and throughout 1997, the disputebetween the SABC and the IBA revolved around the related issues of theSABC’s challenge of M-Net’s license conditions and the process of licens-ing a new private television station. The ambivalent status of M-Net’slicense impacted not only the SABC’s financial standing but also those ofprospective new television broadcasters.

Three issues have formed the basis of the SABC’s complaints regardingM-Net: allegations that it has unfairly exceeded its advertising quota; theoperation of a second channel without a license; and the broadcasting oflive sports events in encoded form.13 After extensive hearings and submis-sions, the IBA decided on only minor amendments to M-Net’s license inthe summer of 1997 (Independent Broadcasting Authority, 1997b). Thedecision pleased neither the major interests hoping to license a new pri-vate television channel, nor the SABC, nor even M-Net, and only hastenedcalls for an overhaul of the IBA Act.

The IBA’s handling of television restructuring has further weakened itscredibility. Contrary to the commitment to holistic policy implementationby the Triple Inquiry, the IBA’s performance in the area of television haslacked integration. During the deliberation on the new private televisionlicense in 1997 and 1998, the IBA received criticism from all sides: from theprospective bidders for the new license for acting too slowly; from theSABC for acting against its own statutory obligation to protect the viabil-ity of public broadcasting; and from community broadcasters and theindependent production sector for not imposing adequate public serviceobligations on the new entrants. After much delay and further hearings,the new television license was finally awarded in April 1998. The success-ful consortium, Midi TV, included two trade union investment companiesamongst its shareholders. This factor was critical in the IBA’s decision,given its explicit mandate to encourage ownership of broadcasting ser-vices by “historically disadvantaged groups” (Independent BroadcastingAuthority, 1998). The licensing of the new station also provided a furtheropportunity for foreign investment in South African broadcasting, sincethe successful consortium included a one-fifth stake held by the U.S.media giant Time Warner Communications (see Goldman, 1998).


Conclusion: Ambiguities of Post-apartheid Broadcasting Reform

Since 1993, South African broadcasting has been dramatically transformed,with the proliferation of new radio and television services, diversificationof new programming, and restructuring of the South African BroadcastingCorporation. With national elections due in 1999, the SABC remains in adominant position in South African broadcasting. The strength of privatecommercial broadcasters, however, has increased significantly. The scopeof action of independent regulatory authorities in broadcasting and tele-communications has been restricted to issues of technical regulation andimplementation of policies, and the national government has assertedeffective authority over the formulation of policy in both sectors. The dif-ferent interests between whom the IBA was meant to adjudicate have beenshown to posses greater political influence than an independent body thatremains financially dependent on the government. The possibilities of aregulatory body acting as an agent of democratization have thus beenrevealed to be structurally limited by the powerful interests of establishedpublic and private institutions in the broadcasting sector.

Given the pace of change in contemporary South Africa, discerninggeneral patterns from this period of reform is a hazardous affair. Oneobservable trend involves the ANC government’s growing determinationto exert greater direction over broadcasting reform, for both political andeconomic reasons. This needs to be placed in the wider context of the shift-ing balance of political power since 1994, which has seen the ANC govern-ment growing stronger as it secures effective control of state apparatuses,enabling it to more confidently circumvent the array of power-sharingmechanisms which were negotiated into existence during 1992 and 1993(Maphai, 1996). The significance of this trend is open to debate, dependingon contested conceptualizations of the meaning and practice of democ-racy in South Africa. One should be wary of an overly mediacentric viewof the determinants of the democratization, whether of the media itself orof South Africa in general. Broadcasting in and of itself cannot securedemocracy or succeed in the task of nation-building. Nor should thesignificance of a shared cultural identity as a condition for democracy beoverestimated when compared with more immediate issues of ensuringthat media institutions can function as effective and accountable meansfor inclusive political communication. It can certainly be argued thatdemocratization in South Africa rests less on securing identification withsymbolic representations of national unity within a plural society andmore on programs to alleviate poverty and economic inequality and theextension of democratic decision-making (Cherry, 1994). The reform ofbroadcasting is significant insofar as it indicates that developmental andredistributive imperatives are being subordinated to the neo-liberal prior-ity of economic growth, and that this has been associated with the attenu-ation of participatory decision-making in the formulation of media policy.

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In contrast, steps towards the practical realization of mass communica-tions as an arena for active citizenship and democratic participation havenot been given high priority since 1994. This is connected to the decline inthe influence of independent civil society organizations on media policysince 1994. More generally, the role of civil societies in South Africa is inthe process of being rethought conceptually and restructured practically(Glaser, 1997; James and Caliguire, 1996). This has been exacerbated bythe centralization of decision-making, clearly identifiable in the process oftelecommunications reform (Horwitz, 1997). The attenuation of previousforms of extended popular participation must, of course, be understood inthe context of the fundamental transformation of the state by a degree ofpolitical representation previously unknown in South Africa (Seekings,1996). In the process, access to policy forums has been altered, withoppositional strategies towards the state being superseded by morecorporatist forms of engagement. Broadcasting reform is therefore charac-terized by a tension between the consolidation of the bureaucratic repre-sentative practices of liberal democratic institutions and long-establishedtraditions of mass participation and popular democracy (see Saul, 1997).

The South African case raises important questions regarding the role ofmedia institutions in democratization. It indicates the importance of dis-tinguishing between a narrow sense of linguistic/visual representationand a broader political sense of representation as delegation or “speakingfor” in shaping media forms (cf. Murdock, 1995; Spivak, 1988). Theinstitutionalization of particular modalities of representation in this sec-ond sense—through markets, public opinion surveys, academic research,voting systems, and constitutions, as well as various forms of institutionalaccountability and participatory decision-making procedures—shapesthe environment in which representations in the narrower sense are pro-duced, transmitted, and consumed. Rather than nation-building beingimagined in South Africa as a primarily symbolic, cultural project, it needsto be understood as a project of institutional transformation. The relation-ship between representations of diversity and the modalities of represen-tation of diverse interests and identities in media institutions and policyneeds to be placed at the center of any analysis of the politics of media,culture, and democracy.

Given the present balance of political forces, the agenda of the ANC,and the entrenched position of capital, the decommodification of commu-nication and media systems that some argue is the prerequisite for genu-inely pluralistic and democratic media systems cannot be consideredlikely in South Africa in the foreseeable future (e.g., Keane, 1991). Indeed,evidence suggests that media commodification is likely to deepen. Theincreasing commodification and internationalization of cultural practicesimplies that media are no longer available in the ways assumed in the pastas means for the suturing of national cultures. Markets facilitate the repre-sentation of varied interests, and contribute to a greater mutability of


identities that might help undermine the effects of previous policiesaimed at enshrining categorical models of cultural difference in SouthAfrica. Nonetheless, democratic access, participation, and representationin media institutions are not reducible to an individualistic rhetoric of“choice” and “competition.” In assessing patterns of reform, critical atten-tion should be directed towards the structures of communication, formsof representation, and modes of participation that particular media struc-tures facilitate and sustain. Thus, while the development of broadcastingpolicy in South Africa in the 1990s has been characterized by a strong com-mitment to open and participatory deliberation over policy options, thesocial relations of ownership, production, distribution, and consumptionforged during the period of apartheid remain largely unchanged after theformal transition to democracy. It is these relations that have continued toexert considerable influence in determining who gets represented, bywhom, and for what purposes.

Acknowledgments

Research in South Africa was undertaken with the financial assistance of The Uni-versity of Reading, and further support for the writing of this paper was providedby the Department of Geography at The Ohio State University. Earlier versions ofthe paper were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association of AmericanGeographers in Boston, March 1998, and to the Department of Communications,The Ohio State University. I would like to thank those who contributed critical sug-gestions on those occasions, as well as three referees for their helpful comments onan earlier draft.

Notes

1. In response to the rapid erosion of the print media’s share of advertisingexpenditures following the introduction of commercial television services in1978, the major press groups lobbied the apartheid state to set up a pay-TVservice. As a result, an encoded subscription television service using theterrestrial frequency spectrum began in 1985, operated by the ElectronicMedia Network Ltd., or M-Net. M-Net quickly established a subscriber baseof 500,000 by 1990 and of one million by 1996. It now operates in more than 30African countries and has interests in Europe and Asia. The late 1970s andearly 1980s also saw the establishment of broadcasting services in the nomi-nally independent homeland states of Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda,and Ciskei.

2. The most reliable and detailed statistics available on consumption of mediaservices in South Africa are produced by the South African AdvertisingResearch Foundation, primarily for use by advertisers and media organiza-tions. It retains apartheid-era ethnic and racial classifications in producing itsdata.

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3. Barnett (1999) provides a detailed consideration of privatization and blackeconomic “empowerment” through unbundling and the progress of mediareform in the mid-1990s.

4. An amendment to the IBA Act (Republic of South Africa, 1995) enabled theIBA to grant temporary broadcasting licenses to community radio stations.This sector has grown very quickly, with more than 70 community radiostations on the air by the end of 1996 (Independent Broadcasting Authority1997a).

5. For a full account of the Triple Inquiry process, see Horwitz (1996). For acritical discussion of the issue of participation during the Triple Inquiry, seeMartinis (1996).

6. The Group of Thirteen consisted of an association of media lawyers, academ-ics, churches, and trade unions. Most of the members had been active inmedia debates in the 1990–1993 period.

7. After much delay, the Bophuthatswana Broadcasting Corporation wasfinally incorporated into the SABC in early 1998, along with the remainingbroadcasting services of other homeland states.

8. As confirmed in the final Constitution in 1996, the eleven official languagesare as follows: Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, Afri-kaans, English, isiNdebele, isiXhosa, and isiZulu (Republic of South Africa,1996b).

9. For discussions of the background to the new language dispensation inSouth Africa, see Desai (1995) and Webb (1996).

10. See Barnett (1998) for a detailed consideration of the politics of languagepolicy in the broadcasting sector.

11. This latter proposal assumed that South Africa could support only threeterrestrial television stations, an assumption that the IBA was forced to aban-don in the light of subsequent decisions in Parliament.

12. Africa on Air consists of the burgeoning media and entertainment conglom-erate Primedia Broadcasting, the investment groups of the National Union ofMineworkers and the South African Clothing and Textile Workers Union,and the Women’s Investment Portfolio.

13. This issue dates back to M-Net’s acquisition in 1995 of exclusive broadcastingrights to provincial and international rugby matches, which the SABC hasargued are a national asset that should be broadcast by the publicbroadcaster.

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